How many of us knew what a CAPON was before today? Sometimes the Worku words make us dig not only into our own vocabularies, but into the history of the words themselves. Capon turns out to have a rather brutal family tree: from Latin capon-, capo, with relatives including Lithuanian kapoti, “to mince” — ouch — and Greek koptein, “to cut” — yikes. Suddenly the word feels less like an obscure bit of poultry vocabulary and more like a tiny etymological horror story. And that digging paid off in the poems: today’s capons became barnyard victims, comic characters, grammatical creatures, dinner, and even one ceremonially dressed bird. Sometimes the strangest constraint words give us the most to uncover.